Phil Carter
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Oftentimes, the biggest wins come right on the heels of a failed A-B test. CACs almost by definition will go up over time. The average consumer subscription app is losing more than 50% of its annual subscribers in the first year and more than 50% of its monthly subscribers in the first three months.
Anytime you increase the number of notifications or emails you send, in the short term, it's like the sugar high. It's going to lead to a short-term pop in your metrics. But if you do that too many times, you kill the channel.
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be part of the show.
Sure. Well, we were talking about depth versus breadth. So I guess I'll start there. I mean, I'm someone who spent my 20s doing a few different things. I spent a few years in venture capital, investing in mostly early stage consumer companies, then spent the last 7 years being a product and growth leader. And then I just started an advising and consulting business.
But the through line has been working with consumer businesses that fundamentally make people's lives better. And then specifically working with a lot of subscription business models.
Growth has become such an overloaded term, right? Does growth mean product? Does it mean marketing? Does it mean zero to one? Does it mean scaling, product market fit expansion, B2B versus B2C? There are a lot of different dimensions to it. But to me, what's fundamentally changed over the last 15 years or so since Facebook created what I would call the first modern growth team
is that the product itself has become the most valuable asset, powering the growth of many tech companies. And I think that's particularly true for a lot of consumer products because a lot of them don't have sales teams.
And so when we talk about growth, fundamentally, we're talking about how do you accelerate your ability to get your product into the hands of more users faster and have those users understand why that value matters to them and why it will make their lives better. That's what's ultimately going to lead to higher conversion rates, better retention, better monetization over time.
But the way that looks is very different across different companies and products.
Sure. I think this really comes down to understanding from a first principles perspective, what is driving the growth of your business. And I think the mistake that a lot of founding teams make, especially now that growth has become such a buzzword, and a lot of VCs will tell their companies, Understandably so. Like, hey, you need to hire a growth leader because growth is important.
And teams with great growth teams have a lot more success, which isn't wrong. But before you do that, you need to understand, okay, for my company and my product and my target customer, what is going to maximize the growth of the business? And I can speak to Quizlet, where I spent almost 4 years leading user growth and ultimately subscriptions as well.
At Quizlet, this was an education product that for years grew through a combination of word of mouth between teachers and their students and between students and their classmates. And then at some point, it hit this tipping point where all of the content that Quizlet had created originally as a digital flashcards app
meant that they were appearing in more and more of these long tail search queries on Google, where students were trying to get help, getting unstuck on homework assignments, or they were preparing for exams. And so over time, Quizlet became one of the most trafficked websites in the US, especially during exam seasons.
So the growth leader and growth team that you would go build at a company like Quizlet, that's 95% plus organic acquisition through SEO and word of mouth, would look extremely different then the growth team you might go hire if you were, say, at a company like Masterclass with a higher price point and where a lot of the acquisition is coming from paid advertising.
And so it really just depends on the fundamental dynamics of how your business grows. You need to know that first before you know who to hire and what sort of team to build.
Yeah, I generally disagree with that position. And I don't want to say that it can't be the right answer in certain cases. But in my opinion, before you have product market fit, you don't even really know if you're building the right product.
And then even once you have product market fit, you then need to figure out how do I get this product to scale within the right channel so that my unit economics remain healthy as I push beyond my highest intent early adopters. And it gets harder and harder to cost efficiently scale my business.
And so I think typically, it's like right around the time where you first demonstrate you have strong product market fit that you want to bring in your first growth leader because you'll have a much better understanding of who that person needs to be. and what sort of team they need to build.
Having said that, I will say the one caveat to this is oftentimes the best growth leaders come out of functions like engineering, analytics, or product. And so what that means is I've seen cases where you have pre-product market fit companies where there's... It's often somebody who's a little bit earlier in their career, but they're just really bright, they're really hungry.
And they have the natural skill set of the intellectual curiosity and the drive to just understand, why are we seeing growth in this area? Why is this target customer demographic taking off? Or why is this channel seeing a spike in acquisition? And so often, those people will then become growth leaders.
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